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Last Week in Pony July 16, 2023

Victor is making progress with his MsQuic integration.

Items of Note

Office Hours

We have an open Zoom meeting every Friday for the community to get together and well, do whatever they want. In theory, Sean T. Allen “owns” the meeting and will often set an agenda. Anyone is welcome to show up and participate. Got a Pony related problem you need help solving and prefer to do it synchronously? Give Office Hours a try.

Attendees this past week were Sean T. Allen, Adrian Boyko, Red Davies, and Victor Morrow.

We talked about a ton of things included snakes, alligators, and how terrifying kangaroos are. We also talked Pony. In particular, we talked about Victor’s project of integrating MsQuic with Pony. Victor’s current plan after planning around with several different approaches is have MsQuic “live alongside” the runtime rather than integrating directly into the Pony runtime as an ASIO subsystem. This approach makes a lot of sense as although MsQuic is “evented”, it is rather different than existing ASIO subsystems like kqueue, epoll, and IOCP.

Sean showed Victor where in the ASIO system that “asio takes a reference to an actor” to prevent it from being garbage collected and where is “gives up that reference” to allow the actor to be garbage collected.

We are all looking forward to Victor’s next update as have cross-platform Quic support for Pony would be awesome.

If you’d be interested in attending an Office Hours in the future, you should join some time, there’s a calendar you can subscribe to to stay up-to-date with the schedule. We do our best to keep the calendar up-to-date.

Community Resource Highlight

We like to take a moment in each Last Week in Pony to highlight a community resource. There are many community resources that can go unappreciated until just the right time when someone hops into the Ponylang Zulip asking a question or facing a problem we have all had at one time or another. Well here in Last Week in Pony, we make it just the right time to highlight one of our excellent community resources.

This week, we draw your addition to the Virtual Users Group (VUG). All the VUG videos are recorded and available on the Ponylang Vimeo page. Let us look at the first VUG, wherein Sylvan discusses Pony generics.

Pony generics are more difficult because of the need to track reference capabilities. Some of the concepts that we must address are:

  • receiver capabilities (i.e., this representing the receiver)
  • viewpoint adaptation (i.e. this->T of how this views some generic T)
  • collections of reference capabilities (e.g., #read which represents all the readable reference capabilities)
  • alias types (i.e., T! which is an alias of some generic T)
  • ephemeral types (i.e., T^ which is some generic T without an alias)

Sylvan discusses these concepts by using the Array class as a working example. This is a highly recommended video for those learning to write Pony generics!

Last Week In Pony is a weekly blog post to catch you up on the latest news for the Pony programming language. To learn more about Pony, check out our website, our Twitter account @ponylang, or our Zulip community.

Got something you think should be featured? There’s a GitHub issue for that! Add a comment to the open “Last Week in Pony” issue.

Interested in making a change, or keeping up with changes to Pony? Check out the RFC repo. Contributors welcome!